Historians have classified four different types of colonialism that have been practised throughout the ages. They are as follows:

Settler Colonialism:

This involves immigration on a grand scale, with political, religious and economic factors being prime motivators. The outcome is that any local existing population will be largely replaced. The colony in question will be exploited for mainly agricultural purposes. The erstwhile colonies of Australia, United States of America and Canada are examples of settler colonialism.

Exploitation Colonialism:

Exploitation colonialism focuses on the exploitation of natural resources and the local population as cheap labour that benefits the mother country economically. An example of this is the use of local labour in India and South East Asia where the indigenous population was used as slave labour to cultivate cash crops such as tea and rubber.

Surrogate Colonialism:

Surrogate colonialism involves a settlement project supported by a colonial power, in which most of the settlers do not come from the same ethnic group as the ruling power. South Africa and Rhodesia (Modern-Day Zimbabwe and Zambia) were examples of Surrogate Colonialism, where large numbers of British settlers became the dominant group despite being in minority as compared to the local indigenous population

Internal Colonialism:

It is a notion of uneven or even discriminative power structure between different areas of a state. This is demonstrated in the way control and exploitation may pass from whites from the colonising country to a white immigrant population within a newly independent country.

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